


Segments

by vass



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-18
Updated: 2016-08-18
Packaged: 2018-02-26 04:25:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2637992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vass/pseuds/vass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>vass's Imperial Radch drabbles and snippets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Unsteady

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Seivarden, before Ancillary Justice. Regrets.

Seivarden had an aunt who abruptly retired and became a mathematician, and spent her remaining days talking about patterns, or not talking at all. Her relatives alluded to her in hushed, pitying tones. It was a cautionary tale for Seivarden. She did her best to want what they wanted for her.

Things aren't clearer on kef. Her emotions are dulled, reason enough for it, but she can't think. She begins to suspect she never learned how, and it's too late. Soon she'll die out here, nowhere, and nobody will know. Her aunt's treatises are still in the Imperial data banks.


	2. Communal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kalr Twelve hangs out with Ship. Double-drabble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Non-detailed Ancillary Sword spoilers.

Kalr Twelve, listening to a planetary ecology briefing about a type of native rodent downwell, finds her mind wandering from the rodents closely curled in their burrows to her own sleeping arrangements. "Is that how we seem?" she says silently to Ship. Thinks of Five's grooming rituals, her own food-gathering, from the point of view of an artificial intelligence.

Ship replies with an image of Kalr decade past. "This was me too," it says. Ancillaries sleeping where Twelve sleeps now, doing the same tasks. Serving out skel, running baths, braiding hair. Ghosts that still haunt _Mercy of Kalr_ 's decks.

Twelve feels that strange double vision she gets sometimes, from being a citizen and pretending to be Ship's ancillary. Suddenly Fleet Captain and the lieutenants are the unnatural ones. And Medic, but that's different, Medical was always her territory.

"Must have been a big change for Amaat One," she comments. Ship, taking the unspoken hint, shows Lieutenant Ekalu tiptoeing into Etrepa's bunkroom, saying softly "It was too quiet, I couldn't sleep." They haven't told on her, of course. She's _their_ lieutenant.

"I don't think Sir would do that," Twelve says, a giggle bubbling up.  
"Unlikely," Ship agrees, but there's something odd about its usual flat tone.


	3. Taste acquisition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tisarwat tries to eat.

Bo Nine keeps bringing her special foods, trying to make her to eat more. She can’t explain to Nine that she’s never tasted rambutan before but knows with equal certainty that it’s really good and that it’s foul and slimy. She thinks she has a sweet tooth, but can remember her (not her) favorite sweet foods tasting stomach-turningly wrong in this body.

If only she had one familiar food, something from childhood to fall back on. All she has is impressions, like recommendations from a friend, an enemy. Whoever heard of a seventeen-year-old who first ate skel two days ago?


	4. Forethought

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skaaiat learns to think first.

"Think before you speak, Skaaiat Awer," her tutor often said. "Is it just? Is it proper? Is it beneficial?"  
"No, but it's true!" Skaaiat always retorted.  
"Not every true statement is just or beneficial," her tutor said. She didn't bother appealing to an Awer child's sense of propriety.

Skaaiat's mother was defter. "Remember how much your position protects you. It does not protect others who might suffer from your speech."  
"But they suffer from my silence."  
"Then you should consult them."

With time, thinking first became easier. Perhaps too easy. They hadn't thought to caution her against speaking too late.


	5. Interim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A brief period of Seivarden's life when she was not particularly worried.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From _Ancillary Sword_ chapter 3: "You were less angry for a few days."

It's been a good few days. Seivarden's a lieutenant again: she has a ship to outfit, ten Amaats under her command, and a new determination that this ship will not hate her. And Breq is here with her, exhausted but alive, and somehow mellower than before. It suits her.

Breq is still in charge of Seivarden, she's her captain now. So that's all right. If this is to be her new life, Seivarden is content. She hasn't even had a nightmare since Breq took her back. It's not until Breq returns from the station that things start to go wrong again.


	6. And both shall row

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One Esk Nineteen, the first year after being cast adrift.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was for the Three Sentence Ficathon. silvr_dagger's prompt, [here](http://caramelsilver.livejournal.com/150194.html?thread=4786610#t4786610): "Imperial Radch series, Breq (/Awn), _and neither have I wings to fly_ "

It happened five or six times, that first year: I lost control of my limbs and lay there on the ground, sick, choking, crying, thinking at my own stubborn body, "Get up, you can't reject the process now, there aren't any more segments, you're not even connected to an AI core, there's nothing here but you!"

Hallucination is not usually a symptom of a failed ancillary connection, but each time it happened, I thought I felt her arms holding me up, heard her voice. My voice returned first; I sang with her until the rest of my body would move.


	7. Gauche

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Seivarden experiences prejudice because of an irrelevant physical difference.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not a drabble, not long enough to be a fic on its own, so I'm amending the whole work summary to make it "drabbles and snippets". This one's set at an unspecified time after Ancillary Mercy. For reasons that don't matter to the story, Breq and Seivarden are traveling outside the Two Systems, in non-Radch space.

A passing stranger shoots a glare at Seivarden as she picks up her tea bowl, hisses something she can't catch. "What did I do?" Seivarden asks Breq quietly.  
"Nothing, actually," Breq says, just as quietly.  
"But she knew I'm Radchaai," Seivarden says. She's doing her best to copy Breq, not to stand out among non-Radchaai. It's harder than she would ever have imagined. Breq is unfairly good at blending in, of course.

"No, it was something else." Breq hesitates. "Nothing you can change, probably."  
"Oh." Seivarden hesitates too. "Was it... a gender thing?" She is getting unpleasantly used to being treated as lesser or condemned for impropriety or outright obscenity according to an ever-changing set of criteria she never understands and which make no sense when Breq tries to explain. But she's determined not to complain about it. Not any more. Not to Breq.

"Not this time," Breq says, surprisingly.  
"Oh. What was it, then?"  
"She didn't like how you hold your tea bowl."  
"What was wrong with it?"  
"Apparently they don't like left-handed people here."  
"What?" Seivarden lowers her voice again hastily. "What does that matter?"  
"It's a local belief. I've seen similar ones before."

Seivarden looks at her hands, ungloved, wrapped around the tea bowl, like she's never seen them before. Thinks of asking why, of protesting, squashes it down. Thinks: _I wish Ship was here._ Thirty more days before the pick-up. Not that she is counting.

"How did you avoid it?"  
"I did what the people around me did," Breq says. "Used the same hand for things that they did. That's usually a good way to avoid trouble." Not always, of course.

"Does that mean I should use my right hand for everything until we leave this station?"  
Breq gives her one of those flat, measuring looks. "I don't think so," she says. "Not if it makes you clumsier. They don't like that either."  
"I could practice," Seivarden offers. "You've been doing everything right-handed since we got here, and you're left-handed too."

Breq makes a minute movement. _I've surprised her_ , Seivarden thinks. "No, I'm not," she says. "I can use either hand equally well."

"No, you are," Seivarden says. "You're just as capable with either hand, but you prefer your left."

Breq pauses for a moment. Then she says "I suppose... This body, before the ancillary conversion, it favored its left hand."

Breq rarely ever talks about her body, before it was her. Seivarden thinks about this, and instead of saying anything, makes a gesture of acknowledgement. As nimbly as she can, with her right hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You have _no idea_ how much I struggled to prevent every line of this from sounding like Radchaai innuendo.


	8. Protest Music

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some original characters discuss pre-Radch music history.

“Thank you so much for giving me access to your archive,” Aivaan says.  
“I’m glad to be of assistance, Citizen,” Historian Ika says. “It’s not often I have another Radchaai showing an interest in my collection.”

As the Historian shows her the catalogue, and her own abstruse classification system, Aivaan finds herself humming. Ika laughs and hums along.  
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Aivaan says. Then, “Wait, you know that one too?”  
“Oh yes. Isn’t it pretty? Never apologise for that, Citizen.”

Aivaan smiles. “My mother used to sing it to me when I was little.” They had never really gotten along, even when Aivaan was a child, and certainly not after the Aptitudes told everyone else what Aivaan had already known, that she was suited for a career in scholarship, not in the military like her mother.

But she remembers her mother’s singing with pleasure: the slow, soothing song, the unknown, ancient words, while she rocked Aivaan to sleep.

“Really? Where did your mother hear it? Does she have an interest in ancient music? Or is there a tradition of singing that where you’re from?”  
“I wondered that myself,” Aivaan admits. “She says her ship used to sing it to her. That and some other songs.”  
“Her ship? Oh! She served on _Justice of Toren_ ,” the Historian says. “And she passed those songs on to you. How wonderful.” She looks thoughtful. “Is your mother a fiery, defiant person? Passionate about reform?”  
“Hardly,” Aivaan says. “Rather stiff and traditional, actually. Why do you ask?”

“Hmm,” Historian Ika says. “What other songs did she learn from _Justice of Toren_?”  
Aivaan hums a few, and the Historian looks even more thoughtful.  
“Oh dear,” she says. The corner of her mouth is twitching. “I don’t want to give offense to you or your mother, Citizen.”  
“Please call me Aivaan,” Aivaan says. “And don’t worry about offending her, I do that all the time.”  
“I’m glad to hear you say that, Aivaan. And please call me Ika. I gather you would like some help with understanding the lyrics?”  
“I would love that. I couldn’t find enough resources even to track down their origin for sure, let alone the languages. And even if I could, I couldn’t be sure Mother had heard the words right.”

Ika calls up the classification codes to display some of the songs, and translates their titles into Radchaai. “Dump The Bosses Off Your Back, Workers of the World Awaken… and here’s the one you were humming before, We Shall Overcome. I’d always suspected the ships and stations of having more opinions than they’d admit to, and now I’m sure of it.”

As she works that afternoon, Aivaan treasures the image of her stern, proper mother, back when she was the same age that Aivaan is now, surrounded by expressionless ancillaries gently singing to her: “Deep in my heart, I do believe we shall overcome someday.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I originally posted this to Tumblr in January 2015. I'm reposting it here to consolidate. Set before _Ancillary Mercy_ , clearly, and quite possibly before the events of _Ancillary Justice_ even.
> 
> My own tags from the Tumblr post: #of course one esk didn't mean anything by it! #it was just singing whatever happened to be on its mind #which just happened to be songs about revolution #coincidentially


End file.
